Date:07/06/2009 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2009/06/07/stories/2009060760822000.htm
National Web security compromised Deepa Kurup BANGALORE: The indigenous malicious code writer had his hands full all of last year, hacking away furiously at endless reams of code, it appears. In 2008, India registered a sizeable increase in nefarious web activities with 12 per cent of spam detected in the Asia-Pacific/Japan region originating from here, as against four per cent in 2007. These figures, compiled in the Symantec 2008 internet security threat report, secured the country the third position in the region with a staggering 250 per cent increase in bot-infected computers. With an average of 836 bots - application software that runs automated tasks over the internet - per day, there were 1,03,812 distinct bot-infected computers observed. Globally, the company observed a 31 per cent increase in the same category. Interestingly, Mumbai found itself atop this not-so-coveted list with 37 per cent of its active computers infected, followed by Chennai at 24 per cent. Cities with substantial internet percolation such as Delhi, Bangalore and Hyderabad remained on the safer side, restricting their percentage jump to a single digit percentage rise. Interestingly, command-and-control bot servers, known to be the most nefarious, increased from 40 in 2007 to 70, a figure that attributes to inadequate awareness about security measures. While web surfing remained the primary source of new infections with attackers adopting customised toolkits to develop and distribute threats, spammers were seen targeting computer users' confidential information. Sale of credit card data accounted for 52 per cent of the now well-established underground economy server. Symantec claims to have created more than 1.6 million new malicious code signatures and blocked over 245 million attempted attacks every month. Worms and viruses Alarmingly, India ranked first in terms of prevalence of worms and viruses attacks in the APJ region, an area that saw marginal increase globally. Nine of the top 10 mal-codes found in India consisted of worms (55 per cent) and viruses (15 per cent) that disabled security-related processes, downloaded additional threats and stole confidential information. In fact, 65 per cent of worms and viruses here are propagated through the simple file sharing/executables, - even through free downloads, freeware and shareware versions of software - pointing to a clear lapse in simple endpoint security and policy. A more recent Symantec India 2009 Security and Storage survey explains to a certain extent the surge in security breaches in 2008. This survey, covering verticals ranging from financial services to retail and real estate, names two stumbling blocks at the operational level: inadequate budgets and ineffective information security management at the operational level. To unsubscribe send a message to [email protected] with the subject unsubscribe. To change your subscription to digest mode or make any other changes, please visit the list home page at http://accessindia.org.in/mailman/listinfo/accessindia_accessindia.org.in
